Home and building automation is becoming even more popular with the support and use of personal area networks that allow local network enabled devices to wirelessly communicate with one another using low-power digital radios.
The Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) has ratified the IEEE 802.15.4 standard for mesh or personal area networks. ZigBee™ is one type of a standards certified suite of high level communication protocols using small, low-power digital radios based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. ZigBee™ specification is thus targeted for use with network enabled appliances and applications that require a low data rate, long battery life, as well as require secure networking. Some examples of such appliances and applications include: Home Entertainment and Control (e.g. Home automation, smart lighting, advanced temperature control, safety and security, movies and music); Wireless Sensor Networks; Industrial control; Embedded sensing; Medical data collection; Smoke and intruder warning; Building automation and the like.
ZigBee™ has a defined rate of 250 kbit/s, best suited for periodic or intermittent data or a single wireless signal transmission between network appliances and ZigBee™ enabled network gateway devices. Data transmission rates between ZigBee™ enabled network devices vary from 20 to 900 Kbps.
Any ZigBee™ compatible network appliance can be tasked with running on the ZigBee™ network. Such ZigBee™ appliances are designed to have radios that operate on an established country specific frequency bands (i.e. 868 MHz in Europe, 915 MHz in USA/Australia, 2.4 GHz in most other countries) as well as 60 KB-256 KB integrated flash memory.
However, the ZigBee™ suite was designed to have standardized application profiles that were specific to the type of market application in which the standard was to be used. For example, the ZigBee™ standard includes discreet application profiles for Home Automation; Smart Energy; Telecommunication Services; Health Care; RF4CE—Remote Control, etc. Each application profile has different set communication protocols within the PAN as well as gateway devices and servers, policy and decision making guidelines, memory usage, data rates and the like.
Typically, ZigBee™ network appliances communicate with one or more servers over a wide area network (i.e. Internet), wherein one or more gateway devices sitting on the edge of a Personal Area Network (PAN) relay the communications between the network appliances and the servers. However, considering there can be several different close range ZigBee™ network appliances, many of which utilize different application profiles in a particular PAN, the sheer handling of data as well as load balancing and other optimization processes must be handled by the servers.
Accordingly, the overall wide area network (between the PAN and the servers) can get bogged down with handling machine to machine communications, while also having to handle traditional network messaging.
What is needed is a system and method for locally managing network devices utilizing low cost/lost power wireless machine to machine communication protocols.